Monday, February 22, 2010

A Rose by Any Other Name

Today I got an email from a student calling himself "David Matthews" and writing from a non-university webmail account with username "user239847." Mr. Matthews was asking about my attendance policy. The attendance policy that is spelled out in the syllabus. (Pretty much it comes down to: I take attendance but it doesn't count in the grade.)

While there are 250 students in my class, I do enough administrative crap relating to this class that I tend to recognize the names of my students during the semester that they are enrolled in my class. Unfortunately, I do not have any students with the first or middle name David or any students with the last name Matthews. I also don't have a Matthew Davis in my class or anyone else with an even remotely similar name.

Thinking that is was some sort of ridiculous bullshit, I wrote back suggesting that the sender should check his schedule to make sure that he was in the right calculus class.

Dave Matthews wrote back explaining that he's in the middle of a very long and complicated name-change situation (!?!?!?!?!?) and repeating the question about the attendance policy (without volunteering any of his alleged other names).